Archive for March, 2016

Are you falling asleep while listening to your podcasts? Regarding the fact, that the sleep timer was on rank four of the most requested features on uPod’s support site this seems to be a common problem among podcast listeners. If this is the case for you, I suggest that you think about whether you are listening to the right podcasts. If you are sure this is already the case, then you might be happy to read that uPod 5.1 Premium finally brings a sleep timer.

But a sleep timer not only helps you to avoid missing too much content when falling asleep. It also gives you a possibility to automatically let you know when your workout or your lunch break is over and it gives you an easy option to finish playback at the next sensful break position (end of chapter or episode).

To activate the sleep timer simply bring up uPod’s playback screen eighter by tapping the playback bar inside uPod or the playback notification from Android’s status bar. If you are a user of the premium version, you will find a new sleep timer icon in the lower right of the playback screen while a playback is running. Simply tap it and pick one of the three options from the menu (see screenshot above):

Stop at end of chapter

Stop at end of episode

Sleep timer

Afterwards the sleep timer icon will be shown “active” and a text besides it indicates the current mode: “Chapter”, “Episode” or the remaining time of the timer (see screenshot below).

I am always trying to provide an outstanding usability in uPod. Input of the desired timer value is one such cases: Other players let you scroll through huge lists of durations with an accuracy of five minutes or more. Due to an effective timer input control (similar to the one of Lollipop’s stock timer app) you can quickly enter any timer value you want in uPod with an accuracy of a single second with just a few taps. For those developer who want to raise the usability of their app to the same level, I’ve open sourced the timer duration picker on GitHub.